


Nightfall

by Jezunya



Category: Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: F/M, Mentions of WWII, Mrs Benn pov, first & second person pov, mentions of nazis, there is less shipping and more bitterness in this than originally expected or intended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:12:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jezunya/pseuds/Jezunya
Summary: I didn’t always hate you. Idon’talways hate you. Of course I don’t. If I did, it would make all of this so much simpler, so much easier.





	Nightfall

**Author's Note:**

> Another one written for school, 20th Century British Fiction, another "creative option" alternative to writing a standard essay. This one specifically had to be a missing scene that could add some new perspective/meaning to the book than previously could have been read from it, so I wrote a sort of epilogue from Miss Kenton/Mrs Benn's pov.

_‘We may never meet again, Mrs Benn,’_ you had said, just shortly before we’d parted ways today. Those words shouldn’t have come as a surprise when you spoke them, yet they did. They shouldn’t have sounded anything like a prison cell slamming shut. And yet.

I am back at home now, back in my husband’s house, after meeting you for tea in the village. The rain is still pouring down outside, and the warmth of the fire in the hearth can’t seem to reach me where I sit at the writing desk. The scrambled beginnings of a letter lie before me, my Biro pen finally abandoned along with several pages with different iterations of ‘ _Dear Mr Stevens,_ ’ or ‘ _My dearest friend,_ ’ or simply, ‘ _How could you, after all these years, how can you still be so—_ ’

I suppose I cannot actually be at all shocked that you finally came to see me after the letter I sent you several weeks ago; my words certainly sounded dramatic enough when parroted back to me from your mouth. I am still, it seems, prone to such indecorous outbursts of the sort that used to draw your ire when we worked alongside each other, and growing once more weary of my husband is the surest thing to draw out such a vehemence in me now. It should hardly be any wonder that you would respond to my pathetic pleas for times gone by with a personal visit, a conversation face-to-face.

Well. It would hardly be a wonder coming from anyone else, coming from a person with even a touch of humanity, but that, I have been long assured, though I fear it has taken me this long to fully realize, is a trait you most decidedly lack.

I jot that down on the page, the one beginning, ‘ _How could you._ ’ I could compose a letter made up entirely of such vicious, awful things, of everything I might like to lob at your head, words shaped into bricks and other missiles, just to see how you’d react. _If_ you would react. I did that once before, though, and in person, even. It didn’t seem to have much of an impact then, when I stood there, in the front hall of the old house, telling you I was to be married and would go away and never come back again. When I told you what a ridiculous, pitiable character we found you to be, my husband—fiancé, then—and I, and all you could speak of, all you could ever seem to _think_ of was returning to your post, returning to serving a group of men who would have seen our nation bombed to ashes by the Nazis. My accusations then had no effect on you; I can’t imagine a letter of the same now would make any difference either.

I didn’t always hate you. I _don’t_ always hate you. Of course I don’t. If I did, it would make all of this so much simpler, so much easier. If I really, truly hated you, I’d not have pulled away from my husband so many times. I came so close, you know, so many times, to hopping a train or hiring a car and showing up on the doorstep of Darlington Hall without so much as a telegram ahead of me, just to see if we could pick up where we had left off. To see if you had even noticed my absence. I came so close, and that most recent letter was the nearest I’ve ever come to actually saying any of it, even though I still don’t have the courage to act on it. Not now, certainly not now, with a grandchild on the horizon, and my husband, my dear, kind, patient husband, once more begging my forgiveness and offering his own in turn.

But you don’t know any of that, do you? You seemed so surprised today, when I spoke of the life we might have had together—not professionally side by side, but matrimonially. It was like watching my daughter first grasp a maths concept when she was small, seeing the light slowly dawn on your face. It’s insulting, in some ways, to find that this is new information from your perspective, that you haven’t spent the past few decades mourning in turns and raging and wishing for something entirely different, wishing to be someone else, somewhere else. It’s infuriating to know that I was alone in these regrets all these years—infuriating, but hardly surprising, all things considered. I had always felt alone with you, even when I could see us living a life together, see us growing old together, somewhere far away from Darlington Hall. I would come out of my imaginings and the real you would leave me cold and abandoned, leave me wanting.

Watching that surprise, then realization, and then finally some smaller, quieter emotion, that came over your face in that moment between when I spoke and when you did, I had to wonder if your shell was finally cracking open. I wondered if the years we had spent apart had worn away at the hard veneer you always wore over your emotions when I knew you before. Perhaps they had, but not enough, not nearly enough for you to say or do anything more than agree with me that we cannot turn back the clock. The worst of it is that I still, after all this time, have no way of telling whether you say that because that is truly all you feel—acceptance, perhaps even resignation, that we have missed some opportunities, but nothing more, no regret, no sadness, no longing—or whether these are merely things you choose to hide from me.

You told me, once, that you did in fact feel things, and even claimed to have been just as upset as I about certain goings on. It was in regards to those two poor housemaids you had fired, because Lord Darlington was too stupid and weak-willed to think beyond the braying of his Nazi-sympathizing friends, and so had objected to having Jews on his payroll any longer. And I had threatened to quit my post in response... Only I didn’t do it, in the end. I was too much a coward, too afraid of going out into the world with such a mark against me, of being friendless and penniless, and, perhaps most of all, though I didn’t dare say so to you at the time, afraid of being without you.

I was afraid of being alone, you see, even though I already was. I already was entirely alone, because you saw fit to maintain exactly that illusion. Even though you said, later, that you had also been troubled by the things our employer had said and done, you never once allowed me to see any of it. Not at the time. Not when it might have counted for anything.

It wasn’t only me, of course. You acted as though you had no emotions, no human feeling, to everyone who knew you. At first, I had thought it was only a matter of your being so superior and cold to any you considered employees beneath you—that business of your father’s name and what I ought to call him still stands out in my mind as about the most snobbish, most obnoxious way anyone has ever spoken to me. It was as if, by calling him by his Christian name, I had somehow offended you personally, as if I had attacked your own dignity and standing within Darlington Hall. As if anything aside from ‘Mr Stevens’ were an insult.

There was a time when I would have liked to have been called ‘Mrs Stevens.’ And you I would have called by your first name, along with ‘darling’ and ‘dearest’... But no, anything but a surname is an insult, and beneath you.

It wasn’t only _me_ you were insulted by, and, to be honest, I don’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, it means the problem wasn’t on my side at all, that I am free of blame or oddity or inhumaneness; on the other, it means I couldn’t have ever meant anything much to you, if even your show of indifference was not particular to me. But at least it wasn’t any specific grudge against me; I know that much, especially when I recall the passing of your poor father. The work always came first, even then. You could not spare even the time it would have required to look in on your father after his passing and to close his eyes. I took that duty on myself, because someone had to do it, and for all your talk of dignity, you couldn’t seem to afford your own father that small dignity in death.

I look down at the scribbled notes and remarks on the paper before me: commentary on a life long past and a life that never was. ‘ _How could you_ ’ screams across the top of the page, and for just a moment, I feel that same old rage, as if I am once again standing in the foyer of the old house, telling you of my engagement. Throwing it in your face. Daring you to say anything, to prevent me, somehow. But you didn’t. You didn’t do anything.

I scratch out the ‘ _could_ ’ from the opening line and replace it with ‘ _couldn’t_.’ And then I do away with the ‘ _How_ ,’ in favour of a ‘ _Why_.’ Why couldn’t you, back then, now, today, why couldn’t you ever seem to feel as I did? Why couldn’t you ever seem to feel anything at all?

The page is a mess. I had set out to write you a letter, when I had first arrived home, the sight of you standing in the rain, as the bus pulled away with me onboard, floating around my head, haunting me. I had wanted to explain it all, everything I had thought and felt over the years, every previous letter I had sent you, when the life I chose became too much, and I drifted, once again, dangerously close to throwing it all away. We said so very little when we met today; I found it disturbingly easy to slide into old propriety, distant and cool. I thought, when I came back to this house I have shared with my husband, that perhaps I could finally make you understand, even though all my other letters have failed, just as my courage has failed, each and every time.

There is something to be said for the number of times I thought of running back to you, and for the fact that, even now, you are not even capable of imagining a world, a life, beyond Darlington Hall.

In the end, there is nothing left to explain, nothing to understand. We cannot turn back the clock and undo the choices we have made. The letter before me is a mess, none of its several drafts adding up to anything coherent, anything I would be brave enough to sign my name to. No, the sun has finally set on that age of my life, and I will never seek it again. I gather up the pages on the desk, shuffle them neatly together into a single stack, and, hearing once more your prediction from this afternoon, your expectation that we should never again meet, I toss the lot of them into the fire and sit back to watch it all burn away.


End file.
